The disclosed embodiments relate to managing graphical assets on electronic devices. More specifically, the disclosed embodiments relate to techniques for rendering graphical assets on multiple screens of electronic devices.
A user typically interacts with an electronic device, such as a personal computer, laptop computer, tablet computer, mobile phone, digital media receiver, and/or portable media player, by providing input to and receiving output from the electronic device through various input and output mechanisms. For example, the user may enter input into a laptop computer using a keyboard, mouse, and/or touchpad and receive output from the laptop computer via a display screen and/or speakers.
Applications on the electronic device may provide user interfaces (UIs) that facilitate interaction between the user and the electronic device. In addition, the UIs may be tailored to the input/output (I/O) devices and/or form factor of the electronic device. For example, a graphical user interface (GUI) of an application on a tablet computer may provide UI components such as windows, menus, icons, checkboxes, text boxes, and/or radio buttons. These UI components may be displayed to the user through a touchscreen of the tablet computer. In turn, the touchscreen may allow the user to manipulate the UI components using gestures such as swiping, zooming, and/or tapping. Because the tablet computer may lack a physical keyboard, the touchscreen may also provide a virtual keyboard that allows the user to enter alphanumeric input into the tablet computer.
On the other hand, the diversity of display technologies in modern electronic devices may complicate the creation and management of graphical UI components across the electronic devices. For example, a set of images, icons, and/or other graphical assets may be displayed within the UI of a mobile application. To support rendering of the graphical assets on mobile devices with various combinations of form factors, screen sizes, pixel densities, and/or resolutions, the graphical assets may be duplicated in different sizes, and the mobile application may be packaged with the duplicated graphical assets. A given size of a graphical asset may then be selected for display on a screen of a mobile device based on the screen size, pixel density, resolution, and/or other attribute of the screen. Consequently, creation or modification of the graphical assets may require duplication across all sizes of the graphical assets. Moreover, the use of duplicate sets of the graphical assets to support multiple screens may increase the overhead in managing the graphical assets within the mobile application, as well as the size of the mobile application.